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Tag: BSG

The pitch of harmonic complex tones plays an important role in speech and music perception and the analysis of auditory scenes, yet traditional rate-place and temporal models for pitch processing provide only an incomplete description of the psychophysical data. resolved harmonics are available for F0s between 350 Hz and 1100 Hz and that these cues are more robust than traditional rate-place cues at high stimulus levels. The lower F0-limit is determined by the limited frequency selectivity of the cochlea, while the upper limit is caused by the degradation of phase-locking to the stimulus fine structure at high frequencies. The spatio-temporal representation is consistent with the upper F0-limit to the perception of the pitch of complex tones with a missing ARRY-614 fundamental, and its effectiveness does not depend on the relative phase between resolved harmonics. The spatio-temporal representation is thus consistent with key trends in human psychophysics. representation of pitch (Shamma, 1985) aimed at combining the advantages and overcoming the limitations of traditional representations. Sinusoidal stimulation of the cochlea gives rise to a traveling wave that moves from base to apex, progressively slowing down as it approaches the cochlear location tuned to the stimulus frequency, where the phase of basilar membrane velocity changes rapidly (Robles and Ruggero, 2001). At frequencies within the range of phase-locking, this rapid phase transition is reflected in the timing of AN spike discharges (Anderson et al., 1970; Pfeiffer ARRY-614 and Kim, 1975; van der Heijden and Joris, 2006; Palmer and Shackleton, 2009; Temchin and Ruggero, 2010). For harmonic complex tones, a rapid phase transition is expected to occur at the spatial locations tuned to each resolved harmonic (Figure 1). These spatio-temporal cues to resolved harmonics could be extracted by a neural mechanism sensitive to the relative timing of spikes from adjacent cochlear locations (Shamma, 1985; Carney, 1990a). Figure 1 Spatio-temporal activity pattern of the Zhang et al. (2001) human peripheral auditory model in response to a harmonic complex tone with F0 of 200 Hz at 50 dB SPL. Left: The model response is displayed as a function of time (in dimensionless units … We tested the spatio-temporal representation of pitch by recording the responses of AN fibers in anesthetized cats to harmonic complex tones with F0 varied in fine increments. We find that this representation is more robust to variations in stimulus level than the rate-place representation and also predicts an upper frequency limit to pitch consistent with BSG psychophysical data. MATERIALS AND METHODS Spatio-temporal pitch cues in a peripheral auditory model The spatio-temporal representation of pitch is based on phase transition cues to the frequencies of resolved harmonics created by the cochlear traveling wave. Figure 1 shows the spatio-temporal pattern of AN activity produced by a physiologically-realistic peripheral auditory model (Zhang et al., 2001) in response to a harmonic complex tone with missing fundamental at 200 Hz. The response pattern is shown as a function of both time (expressed in dimensionless units at the cochlear location tuned to depends only on the ratio (Zweig, 1976). This means that the magnitude and phase of the cochlear response to a pure tone of frequency at the location tuned to are equal to the magnitude and ARRY-614 the phase of the response of the cochlear location to a tone of frequency for the set of cochlear locations tuned to {to the set of probe frequencies can, in principle, be inferred from the responses recoded to a series of complex tones with varying F0. Figure 2 illustrates the scaling invariance principle using the Zhang et al. (2001) model of peripheral auditory processing for cat. The left panel shows the model spatio-temporal response pattern to a harmonic complex tone with F0 (500 Hz) for CFs ranging from 750 to 2250 Hz. The right panel shows the model temporal ARRY-614 response patterns at a cochlear place (CF0 = 1500 Hz) to a series of complex tones with F0s varying from 333 to 1000 Hz. The F0s and CFs were chosen so that the (number of stimulus cycles). The spatio-temporal response patterns for the two conditions are nearly indistinguishable: they both show fast latency changes around integer values of neural harmonic number (2, 3, 4),.